bangersandmash

Cloud computing has been pushing its way into my consciousness again this week. It reached the point of indigestion with Michael Stephens name dropping the computing meme of 2008 in his “Ten Trends and Technologies of 2009” but the cloud really pushed its way into my consciousness with the introduction of iWork at the Apple Keynote Adress earlier this month.

Copyright

Lets get the big one out in the open early. Copyright. For those who sneer at the use of the phrase “fair use,” the era of cloud computing is going to be your own personal hell. Cloud computing is built around the idea of shared documents and files. Enforcing copyright in the era of the cloud is going to be a nightmare. Freely collaborating with a community to develop and distribute an idea, however, will become easier than ever.

Services like Google Apps, Zoho, iWork and others allow multiple parties to access and share files without purchasing expensive suites of applications. On the surface it looks like a wonderful brave new world, but are we heading for another instance of format wars?

All access, all the time

In his review of iWork Liam Cassidy says:

And here’s the really clever part that everyone who has ever collaborated in an online workspace will love: the ability to automatically make the document available for your Viewer’s to download in all the most common file formats.

Formats. Remember when MSWord couldn’t read a Word Perfect file? When Macs and PCs couldn’t exchange data (easily)? Formats became the poster child for open computing. Programs that didn’t support the right formats became relics and disappeared. But these common file formats refer to traditional desktop computing formats — .doc, .pdf, etc. This is important if you are downloading the file to edit in MSWord, but with cloud computing format should be irrelevant. It will be access that determines the relevance of the service and the extent of the collaboration.

If I write a document in a service such as iWork I can share it with anyone, but if they want to contribute to it they will need to sign up for an account. The Mac vs. PC religious wars could begin to look childish as people wonder why they cannot directly open the iWork document their client created in their Google Docs account. After all, it’s just a .doc file which both can read, why isn’t there a way to take the document that my friend created in Zoho and open it in Google Docs without needing to download it to my computer first? Tribes will form around services as people begin to resent the idea of signing up for accounts — especially paid accounts — or downloading anything to their computers. I fear the cloud because I fear the day someone gets snobby about which service I’ve signed up for. I also fear the day that “the kids” don’t know how to manage local files and can’t ship from one service to the other. Damn kids.